One of the most celebrated action titles of the last generation, Nier Automata combines Platinum Games signature styles with inventive, diverse gameplay and a stunning story. From a technical standpoint, however, the situation was far from ideal: the game was plagued with frame rate and image quality issues on last-generation machines, with shaky performance coupled with a lot of aliasing. This is why the Switch port was a bit of a surprise when it was announced a few months ago: there’s a huge performance gap between the Switch and even the basic last-gen consoles with little room to cut the resolution before the picture quality becomes unacceptable. gets bad. This seems like one of the so-called “impossible ports” – a technically demanding title that has been scaled down for Nintendo’s hybrid console, often with somewhat mixed results.
The challenge is clear – and it all comes down to how difficult this game was to run on PS4 and Xbox One. Despite relatively pedestrian imagery, the title was aimed at 900p without any anti-aliasing, with somewhat messy performance on both machines. The typical runtime was 40-60 fps, with combat and open-world traversal causing problems. It’s important to keep this relatively poor rendering in mind, as the Nintendo Switch falls far behind those machines in raw computational performance. So what kind of compromises are we seeing here?
Relative to the base last-gen consoles, the Switch release has been completely downgraded – although the overall picture still looks surprisingly similar. When compared to its Xbox One S counterpart, the first thing you notice is a significant reduction in texture details. Textures are broken down across the board, with lower resolutions, not to mention simplified layers and material properties. In some areas, the textures look smooth, with no fine detail to speak of, although usually it’s not that severe.
The foliage has been brought back and tweaked to better suit the Switch. Trees and shrubs have much lower resolution alpha textures and simplified layouts, making them appear much less dense. The grass density has only been slightly reduced, but curiously, the 3D polygonal grass has been replaced with alpha-tested textures in the original versions of the game. It’s a big change visually, but the results look good overall, though they look a bit too bright when rendered under shadow areas.
Lighting is also somewhat simplified. This is most apparent with regard to the game’s dynamic light sources, which have often been removed or removed. Notably, most of the point lights in background areas have been removed. Volumetric lighting also seems absent on Switch, or at least scaled back significantly. There are also sometimes quite large differences in ambient lighting. It’s not entirely clear what’s going on, though I’d imagine tweaks to the demanding global lighting system present on last-generation consoles, or possibly its removal, could be to blame. Most of the time, though, the Switch version holds up on its own terms – it’s mostly the smaller details that stand out when there are differences.
Elsewhere, some of the geometric details in the environments have been lost. This is pretty obvious at times, but most of the time the downgrades are minor and only really stick out in side-by-side comparisons, things like less round barrels or blockier debris on the ground. Particle effects are also modestly scaled back, with fewer particles spawned during explosions, sword strikes, and dodges. In the heat of battle, this concession isn’t too noticeable, but it makes the fights seem a little less intense.
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Overall though, the Switch release seems very similar to the last generation console versions overall. While there are a whole host of cuts, most don’t really stand out during gameplay, and the game still looks and feels like Nier: Automata. In some scenes, the two machines are basically neck-and-neck, delivering slightly different looking but similarly capable versions of the same shot.
However, there is one big settings benefit that the Switch release does have. Switch comes with anti-aliasing. The anti-aliasing coverage doesn’t really impress and gives the impression of a simple post-process technique, but it does outperform the last-generation versions on base consoles that, for some inexplicable reason, didn’t have AA. In areas with a lot of distant detail or fine foliage, the Switch often shows better image stability than Xbox One. However, some shots look significantly softer, which comes down to the Switch’s resolution setting.
In docked mode, the Switch aims for a resolution of 1080p – which is higher than the base consoles of the last generation. Some shots count a little below that figure, but you can find 1080p edges in most shots with some form of countable detail. Resolving power during a given shot varies quite a bit, especially during movement, and there are some stipple artifacts on certain edges, suggesting some form of reconstruction may be at play. Portable mode has a similar setup, but this time the target resolution is 720p. Compared to side-by-side, the image resolves a little less clearly than in docked mode, but clearly holds up much better on the Switch’s screen. It looks reasonably sharp and clean on the internal display – although it does look a little soft at times – and a lot of scenes really come to the fore on the Switch OLED panel in particular. Outside of the resolution, it seems to match the docked mode in terms of visual settings.
So how does the performance look? Virtuos has wisely lowered the frame rate target here from 60fps on last-gen home consoles to 30fps here. Since 60 fps was a challenge on exponentially more powerful hardware, the lower frame rate was probably unavoidable. In the beginning I was very impressed with the level of performance. Yes, this is a 30fps game, but it felt remarkably consistent – essentially a locked-down 30fps with stable frame pacing for the first hour or so of the game. I noticed a few drops while playing but they were very small.
But as I progressed, the picture became less rosy. Small frame rate stutters were more common, especially when traversing parts of the open world and fighting enemies. It was still pretty consistent, but these little interruptions were definitely noticeable. However, as I wrapped up my time with Nier Automata, more pronounced frame rate issues became quite common. Some of the bigger fights were mostly in sub-30fps territory, at worst in the low to mid-20s. A handful of environments also caused framerate issues.
In general, however, I think the level of performance is reasonable given the hardware and the relatively strong quality of the visuals compared to last generation home consoles. 30fps is the norm, with temporary dips that don’t detract too much from the experience. It’s really the bigger battles that can be seriously problematic, although this is hardly representative of the majority of the action. The portable mode seems to speak for itself too, with generally good performance with occasional sub-30 fps moments. My impression is that the framerate level might be a bit more consistent here, with fewer drops overall – a motif common to many Switch titles.
A lot of time and effort has clearly gone into making this port shine. Virtuos has reworked the game so that it generally looks like the Xbox One and PS4 versions of the game, and can sometimes even look a bit better. The performance isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty good and manages to hold 30fps during most gameplay. Nier Automata is a modern action classic worth experiencing, and Nintendo’s hybrid console offers a cleverly optimized reinterpretation that works great on the go.
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